The end of the Solar System might come sooner than expected.

A new scientific study published in The Astrophysical Journal Letters has revised predictions about the end of our Solar System, indicating a faster and more chaotic fate than previously thought. The research, led by the California Institute of Technology, drastically shortens the potential survival time of the outermost planets—Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune—after the Sun's death. It was once believed they could survive for a hundred billion years; now simulations suggest they may not last more than a billion years.

The study, based on 672 simulated scenarios, shows that if the Sun exhausts its hydrogen and ejects its outer layers through violent explosions, 96% of the scenarios lead to a fatal instability for the planets within three billion years of its transformation into a white dwarf. In many cases, the planets would be ejected from the system or swap orbits, resulting in a scenario of gravitational chaos.

The Solar System has a destiny marked by the life of its star, the Sun. In about five billion years, the Sun will exhaust the hydrogen in its core, the source of its energy. This event, long predicted by science, will trigger the final phase of its existence. Initially, the star will expand enormously, becoming a red giant that will likely swallow the innermost planets, Mercury and Venus. Earth might be spared direct ingestion, but it would become a scorching and uninhabitable world.

After this expansion phase, the Sun will expel its outer layers into space, leaving behind only its hot, dense core, which will compress into an object called a white dwarf. It is the aftermath, the fate of the remaining planets orbiting farther out, that has been revised by the study. The researchers, combining models of solar evolution with orbital simulations, have discovered that the gravitational impact of this violent transformation could destabilize the orbits of the gas giants much earlier than expected, accelerating the dissolution of the entire planetary system.